


my old man is a bad man

by framboise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Politics, Daddy Issues, Dead Ned Stark, Deal with a Devil, Dirty Talk, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Mentor/Protégé, Morally Ambiguous Character, Older Man/Younger Woman, Possessive Behavior, Scheming, Secret Relationship, Seduction, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:04:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23122150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: She’s been perfect little Sansa Stark for years, a credit to her family with her porcelain beauty, her conservative clothes and careful choices, her polite smiles and love of charity.Is it any wonder then that at saintly Ned Stark’s third memorial, she finds herself in a plush walk-in wardrobe fucking her father’s rival against the wall, biting the collar of his immaculate suit jacket so the people milling downstairs can’t hear her moans.
Relationships: Petyr Baelish/Sansa Stark
Comments: 51
Kudos: 290





	my old man is a bad man

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here we are at the end times, so I thought I'd finish an old draft and post it for some distraction reading. 
> 
> This is a modern political AU in the form of linked vignettes, with a somewhat open-ending.  
Ages: Sansa-22, Petyr-45

* * *

It happens for the first time at her father’s memorial – at the third memorial held to honour Senator Stark to be precise – in the Vale at the old Arryn estate, when she’s feeling so sad and bitter and twisted inside that she can’t bear to stand in the drinks reception any longer, with the way everyone looks at her with pity and blame like she was the one who made her father’s plane malfunction, with the way they’re waiting for her to show some kind of weakness, waiting for her to break.

She’s been perfect little Sansa Stark for years, a credit to her family with her porcelain beauty, her conservative clothes and careful choices, her polite smiles and love of charity.

Is it any wonder that two weeks ago, during a volunteer stint in a remote school in Skagos, she got so drunk one night she was hospitalised, her negligent bodyguard getting every member of staff to sign a strict non-disclosure agreement as her father stepped on a rickety single-engine plane to fly to see her because, his people told the press, fifteen minutes before the plane's engine failed, she was suffering with exhaustion.

Is it any wonder that at saintly Ned Stark’s third memorial, she finds herself in a plush walk-in wardrobe fucking her father’s rival against the wall, biting the collar of his immaculate suit jacket so the people milling downstairs can’t hear her moans, her whines, as he bucks into her, as he murmurs utter filth in her ear and has her coming twice, jerking in his hold as he pants and clutches her hips tight enough to bruise.

She can’t look at him afterwards, as she wipes herself with the tissues he hands over, smooths down her demure knee length skirt, checks her light make-up in the mirror of his dead wife’s vanity. He doesn’t ask her if she’s alright and she’s thankful for that.

*

After the memorial she asks the Stark's driver to return her to her own house, to the disapproving looks of her mother in the seat across from her.

They're supposed to be putting on a _show of togetherness_, as she heard Robb's advisor declare earlier. It's only been a few weeks since Ned died and his plane was dredged up from the bottom of the sea, but Robb's campaign to take over their father's seat has already begun.

_Family, Duty, Honour_. Rob has the Tully colouring, and her mother's dutiful heart.

Sansa's not sure what she has, or where her brokenness comes from.

Usually her heart lifts when she arrives home – an old shepherd's house on the hill above King's Landing that still has white-washed walls, though the interior is modern and there's an extension at the front for her bedroom with glass doors – but today she feels a shiver of loneliness that she tells herself is only an autumn wind.

She's spotlit as she walks to the front door and has to unlock it and wave back before the car will drive away. Her mother and brothers think she's being foolish saying no to a guard, especially after her father's death, even if it was a mechanical fault in the plane, but she feels observed enough in public, she doesn't need it in private.

Perhaps she likes a bit of danger too, she admits as she walks through her darkened house without turning on the lights, the pulse of her heart speeding up, perhaps she likes daring the universe to do its worst. Better that than feeling nothing.

When she leans over the sink to drink straight from the tap, she feels the ache between her legs and remembers the dressing room interlude. Her eyes snap shut, her stomach heats.

He had been watching her since she arrived with her family and she had watched him in return, their eyes meeting as she sipped on the water that her mother handed her brusquely. Later, he gave a tilt of his head towards her, a twitch of his mouth and then left the room.

She followed him across the entryway and up the grand staircase. Down the soft carpeted corridor, past an austere portrait of his dead wife and then another of her first husband. He opened a door and waited for her, staring at her with such heat she felt a wobble in her legs that became a shiver when he touched her by the waist and nudged her into the room, pushing her back against the closed door and kissing her before she had time to take a breath.

She wishes she remembered more beyond snatched moments, wishes she was still there under his hands and hot mouth, that he was here to push her over the kitchen countertop and make her forget, make her body hum with pleasure.

If someone saw them leave to go upstairs - she thinks now, padding to her bedroom and finally turning on the light, wincing from a headache brought on by too many polite smiles – they would have thought she was a slut. To do such a thing at her father's memorial, with a widower old enough to _be_ her father. Oh, they would judge her, they would gossip, and her family would hate her, scrambling desperately to stop the story getting to the press and ruining everything even more than she had already ruined it.

It's strange the kind of power she has, strange the effect that being an ordinary kind of sad girl – sleeping with the wrong people, drinking too much – can have on the political health of a dynasty. Or that it could make a beloved senator step on a plane to his death.

She doesn't drink alone tonight, but she does take a too-cold shower and hate herself.

In the morning when her phone lights up with a message – and just how did he get her number in the first place, she wonders idly – she answers him instead of deleting it, and swiftly has an invitation to meet him for _a drink_ at his townhouse. A car will come and get her, he says. And she _shouldn't feel the need to dress up_, he _doesn't plan on any other guests arriving_.

_Smooth_, she thinks with an inward scoff.

Following the spirit of his message, if not the words, she dresses up, in a nice dress with some very nice lingerie underneath, and barely ten minutes after crossing the threshold of his slick chrome house, he has her laid out on the bed with his mouth on her cunt and two fingers coaxing her to a first whimpering orgasm.

"Good?" he asks as he sits back on his heels and she tries to catch her breath. He reaches for the whiskey he had set down on the side table and she watches his wet lips smirk around the rim.

"It was fine," she says and he laughs.

"You're a perfectionist, Sansa, I approve of that."

"I think that's the first full sentence we've exchanged," she says, stretching her hands over her head, watching him watch the rise of her tits.

He cocks his head. "I said some pleasantries when you arrived, surely. Asked how you were and such."

"Did you? I don't remember," she teases.

He puts the drink down and crawls over her. She's naked and he's still in his suit and it's delicious.

"What am I going to do with you, Sansa," he says, clucking his tongue.

"Whatever you want," she replies and shivers at her own words and the way his eyes go dark and pleased.

*

The assignations continue – at his house, at hers, in the back of his town car on a dark lane when she climbs into his lap and rides him with one hand on the roof so she doesn't hit her head.

"I hope I'm not keeping you from your work too much," she tells him one afternoon as she lies on the fine sheets of his bed and he runs a hand down her bare back.

"You're not," he says.

"You're not keeping me from _my_ work, because I don't have any."

"Do you want to work? You don't have to, with your money." He gets up from bed and lights a cigarette.

_A terrible habit_, she had teased him the first time.

He had raised his eyebrows, blown out a puff of smoke. _I'm not allowed to be seen smoking, it's true._

_Just like you're not allowed to be seen with me_, she had replied.

They never talked about secrecy, they didn't need to. Sansa was the first daughter of a Senator and Petyr had, as her father put it, _been scheming since the schoolyard_.

Petyr had married the widow of the ex Vice-President and had then made the move from Congressman to Senator, losing his wife just after he was elected. _Look at him pretending to be human, to be decent_, Ned had muttered over breakfast when he looked at a picture of Petyr from her funeral.

"Now the truth comes out, you're only with me for the fabled Stark fortune," she drawls.

He smirks. "Fortune, with your father? No, a safe portfolio of dull stocks and shares and a few ugly houses."

"You're going to bring up my dead dad? Now?" she replies, trying to concentrate on the spark of their conversation and not her grief.

He shrugs.

"You know, he once called you a Machiavellian piece of shit masquerading as a man."

"Did he."

"Don't look so proud." She sits up and reaches for his discarded shirt, tugs it over her shoulders and shivers at the fine silk.

"How are your family?" he asks.

"You mean my mother?"

"Do you think I'm still holding a torch? Can you imagine Catelyn and I seeing eye-to-eye on anything?"

She shakes her head. He's stubbed his cigarette out now. From her new upright angle she can see his phone flashing on the nightstand. "I think someone's calling you."

"They always do," he says ruefully and then sits beside her. "It was a childhood infatuation," he says, uncharacteristically straightforward, "it was gone in a flash when I got to know her and there's nothing left there. I'm sure you've had regretful crushes. Joffrey springs to mind."

"Oh god," she says and hides her face in her hands. "I don't know what I was thinking," she says, remembering that interview with Teen Vogue when she was thirteen and how she had eagerly answered the question about crushes before her handler could stop her.

She had only known the Vice-President's son from afar and he was very...blond and supposedly unthreatening for a teen girl. Now she knows different, of course. She knows from the gossip of friends, and her mother's tasteful warnings-off, all about his _proclivities_.

"My mother thinks I should date at the moment. That it would _look good_."

"Well it's good of you to be so dutiful," Petyr says, picking up her hand and kissing the palm.

"Are we dating, Petyr?" she replies mirthfully. "Have you bought me a corsage? Shall I take you home to meet the family?"

"Well, I'm not seeing anyone else."

"Neither am I."

"Good," he says, holding her gaze.

"The rumour is you don't keep the company of ladies anyway."

"Oh is it?"

"Like you don't know that."

"Some mystery is important, and if it helps gain the support of certain rather rich donors who are that way inclined, well." He opens his hands.

"So no plans to marry again?"

"Are you asking, darling?" he teases and she feels her cheeks blush.

"That would be something, us marrying," she says. "God, can you imagine? I think my mother would drop down dead. And the papers would lap it up, they'd call us all sorts of names." She shakes her head. "So who's next on your list, the wife of the President?"

He huffs a laugh.

"You've already married the Vice-President's wife. Where else can you go?"

"So cynical, Sansa." He kisses her softly, teasingly, and then stands up. "Regretfully, I should probably take some calls and then some meetings. You're welcome to stay here though."

"No," she says quickly, "I'll go home. But I'm taking this shirt," she adds.

"I'll think of you wearing it," he says.

When she gets home, the house smells musty and looks old and tired, empty. Right now, her hours with Petyr are the only ones when she feels alive, when she can forget. Alone, the memories come rushing back, the guilt. 

*

She hears the crunch of his shoe on broken glass in the hallway first, the squeak as he moves his toe away from it.

She can picture it, his careful movement. Everything he does is careful, measured. Except for when he gets lost in fucking her and grasps too tightly, gasps loudly, groans.

Before the memorial she didn't remember watching him closely, paying any attention, but she must have, she must have known he was watching her, wanting her.

"Sansa?" he calls out.

She doesn't answer.

"There you are," he says when he comes into her bedroom and sees her lying on the ground.

She watches him closely for signs that he finds her situation distasteful, but he only looks at her knowingly and clucks his tongue with a pity that she finds acceptable on him and no one else. 

She's lying on the heap of her towel from her shower hours ago, hair straggly, eyes tight and sore from crying, mouth swollen from vodka. Her fingers are bloody too, she thinks absentmindedly, as he crouches down beside her, fine leather shoes creaking, and touches the heels of her palms.

"We need to clean this up," he says.

His eyes slide across her bared skin. He wants her even now and it pleases her on some level.

"Do you like that I'm a mess, Petyr?" she asks, her voice rough from the tears, her tone flat.

He tsks and reaches down to lift her by her armpits, his hands warm on her chilled skin. "You're a very pretty mess, if you are one," he says, pushing her hair back from her face as she sits.

"You're shameless."

"Just saying it like I see it," he says and she does smile then, at his tone, the phrase he must have stolen from someone else because it's too casual for someone who's so careful with words.

"I am a mess, though," she says and looks at her hands.

He rubs a thumb across her unmarred wrists. "You're young, you'll heal."

"And then what?"

"Then..." he says, helping her up and ushering her over to the vanity stool, gathering up her discarded dressing gown and dressing her like a doll. _Then life goes on_, she imagines someone well-meaning saying but she's not sure he is. "Then, you make your climb."

"My climb?" she repeats as he ties a neat knot of the dressing gown tie.

"I'm not going to let you fall, darling," he says, looking at her in the mirror.

He doesn't mean he'll catch her, he means that he won't let her sink lower than she has.

"I'm not sure you get to be the one who decides that."

"You want me to leave you to your fate?" he asks, resting his chin on her shoulder. She can feel the slight scratch of his beard against the side of her face.

"I don't see why not, I mean I'll fuck you if you want, but there's nothing else here for you." She waves a hand at her body.

He turns her by her shoulders and looks at her intently.

"What?" she says petulantly, "Am I being crude and _unbecoming_?"

"Sansa," he declares, with a glint of humour, a twitch of his mouth. "You are elegant even in your dishevelment."

She scoffs.

"If you were some poor match girl with soot streaks on your cheek and two black teeth you'd be elegant."

"You should have seen me at the hospital then, with vomit in my hair." She smiles but her chin crumples. Remembering that drinking binge means remembering that it got her father killed.

She clutches at the fine weave of his dark shirt as he cups a soft hand on the back of her head. "Someone once told me that you dressed like the Devil, do you know that?" Her voice is thick but she pushes her tears back down. "All dark shades and lavish silks." She nudges her hand inside his jacket and feels the silk, feels the shiver of his side too.

There is something about power. Something about control. Even _she_ isn't convinced she can accept a quiet life now, a dutiful one – marrying some corn-fed heir from an old money family, taking lunches of tiny salads with other women who sit on the boards of charities, birthing the next generation of wholesome lordlings.

"Good tailoring is evil now, is it?"

"Maybe it's the beard," she muses.

"You like the beard," he murmurs, dipping his head to kiss her neck.

She shivers, she does.

*

She goes to her mother's for a lunch that isn't really lunch but a planning session, an interrogation, masked as a family get-together.

Arya has been invited back from the North where she's been busy archery training at Winterfell, Robb is already waiting at the table with his notebook and new serious haircut, Bran is typing away on his custom laptop and Rickon is being kept occupied in another room by the nanny.

The newest Starks are also here – Jeyne, and Gendry, who Arya had married a few months before Ned's accident, in a charming ceremony in the woods that the internet thought was winningly humble and the society ladies indulgently allowed.

Arya had never felt the need to conform, and sometimes it made Sansa so angry and jealous, even though she did like parts of her role – some of the dresses (even if they had to be more conservative than she would have wished) and nice things, the fine settings, the parties and yes, the feeling of importance.

"And what have you been up to?" her mother asks Sansa as she passes the pepper.

"Not much," Sansa replies.

"You haven't responded to any of Sarra's emails," Catelyn notes, speaking of her assistant who has been firing off invites to Sansa for weeks, always with an overly earnest paragraph about how she doesn't _have_ to come, and she would understand _completely_ if Sansa doesn't wish to have a full calendar at the moment and she _hopes_ that Sansa is taking things _easy_.

"I'm not in the mood to be paraded in front of cameras at the moment," Sansa replies, spearing a piece of salmon on her fork.

Her mother purses her lips. "Well it's not good to sit at home and dwell either. Your father wouldn't want that for you, he'd want you to keep busy, keep your spirits up."

"He wouldn't want me to grieve?"

"_Sansa_," her mother admonishes. "Don't be vile." She shakes her head as Robb frowns from the head of the table. "We're all suffering, I just don't want you to be alone."

"I'm alright, mom," she replies, feeling bad at the tremble in her mother's lip.

Catelyn and Ned were so in love, Sansa didn't know how lucky she was until she spent time at other family's houses and got to experience the iciness of other marriages, the muffled arguments. They were so in love and she knew from a too-young age that she wouldn't have that, that something about her didn't fit with the young men she was supposed to swoon over.

"There's an event at the hospital, for the Ned Stark wing, I'd like you to come," Robb says. "It's on Tuesday."

"I'll be there," Sansa says. Even if she thinks there's something a little wrong about Robb using these ostensible memorial events as launchpads for his own career. But he'd only say that he was trying to keep their father's legacy alive if she questioned him, make her feel bad for even saying so.

"Arya?" he prompts.

"I'll be there. I was there this week anyway, visiting the veterans and the maternity ward."

Sansa drops her eyes to her plate. Arya doesn't need reminders to be charitable, as unconventional as her life is as an athlete, as her masculine dress is. It comes naturally to her to help others. And what is Sansa doing but hiding from the world?

"Have you talked to Harrold Hardyng recently, Sansa?"

"I've never really talked to him."

"You should, he likes you," her mother says and winks.

Sansa inwardly winces. "He's not my type."

"What? Rich? Handsome?" Robb jokes. "You're the fussiest girl I know."

"Why don't you go out with him then?" Sansa replies with a fake smile.

Her mother tuts.

*

She's staying at his cabin in the woods on the hill so close to the sea that the sound of the waves fills her dreams and she wakes with lips tasting of salt.

People come for meetings with Petyr but she is left alone in her own wing, and to call it a cabin is ridiculous because it's larger than most people's houses, with every kind of modern appliance and luxe furnishing.

_I feel like Gretel_, she had said when he drove her there in the night through the woods.

_Well I do have lots of sweet treats to offer you_, he replied.

_And you are wicked_, she said.

The puns about eating, about his hungry mouth and nipping teeth, didn't need to be said.

She likes being left alone, and not having to compose herself for public consumption, that technically no one else even knows that's she here, her family believing she's back in King's Landing holed up in her lonely house. But she's been spending too much time scrolling on her laptop (the new laptop he bought her in case her old one had been bugged) and her phone (ditto), reading stories about herself, columns, tweets, picture essays of all the times she looked less than perfect. Why isn't good little Sansa Stark by her mother's side, they ask. Why isn't she campaigning with her brother.

Because she's a liability, she reads between the lines, because everyone knows she got her father killed and they're sure there's all sorts of dirt to be found if they dig hard enough, bribe the right people.

There is, and it's only a matter of time. And when Petyr reads those stories – because somehow, in two months his opinion has become the only one Sansa cares about, and she doesn't want to look at that too closely – he'll think she's a liability too.

He thinks she's elegant, cultured, that later, after a correct amount of time has passed and everyone has forgotten how young she is, she'll be an asset to him. She's not naive, all this talk about her and her future is just words, she's a pretty object at best.

She stews in her thoughts, sees flashes of memories that have tapping her fingers against her legs, clenching her jaw.

By the time his guests are gone and she hears him in the kitchen, she's feeling sick with dread.

"Alright?" he asks, with his back to her, arranging food some invisible chef had prepared for them earlier.

"Fine," she says tightly. "You?"

"Fine," he says and glances over his shoulder.

"What am I doing here?" she asks suddenly.

"Enjoying your leisure time," he suggests. "Getting some fresh sea air, having a well-earned rest from your family's bullshit."

That he always takes her side gives her a flush of warmth but it's not enough to stop her anxiety.

"Have they talked about me? Your advisors? Have you made a plan?"

"No, they know better than that."

She scoffs. "As if a man like you who plans his public image to the hilt isn't thinking of it, as if they aren't too."

"Where's this coming from?" He's set the cutlery down now and turned round to focus on her.

"You know there's other stories about me." She bites her lip. "There's a moratorium now because my family is supposed to be in mourning but the Karstarks aren't going to let that go on once the campaign ramps up."

"You're worried I'll find out something," he muses and moves towards her. "But I know everything already, Sansa, I know about the drinking, about Jeyne, about the bodyguard you slept with. I know how many times you snuck out of your family's holiday home and where you went. I know about your exam and the night with the cocaine, I know _everything_."

"You're lying," she says, voice wobbling. "You don't have personal spies on me, if you knew then other people would know too, then it would have been all over the papers."

There's something about his face, something about the way he smiles, with a curl of wry pride...

"I've always had a good relationship with the press," he says as her heart kicks in her chest.

"You can't have, not all those times—"

He can't have paid them off, all the people seeking to benefit from her youthful mistakes. Not all of them, that's impossible.

"But why?" she asks, shaking her head. "My father was your rival in the North, and he ran on family values, it would have been easy to use me to get at him. Why didn't you?"

He shrugs, his eyes glinting, and strokes an idle hand down her arm.

"Why, Petyr?" she demands.

"Because I could see your potential."

She scoffs, and feels her lower lip tremble. He isn't lying, she knows that, it isn't just that he wanted her, that he wanted her to be beholden to him.

"That's crazy," she whispers and covers her face with her hands.

"Does it unnerve you that I've been keeping an eye on you?"

"It should do," she says, voice thick.

"If you want to talk, Sansa, to plan, to come into the fold," he says, putting his hands on her shoulders, "then you can. But there's no rush and there's no need. You can rest and take it easy."

"You make it sound like the mob."

He smiles.

"Have I thrown my hat in with a gangster, Petyr, a lowlife scoundrel?"

"Not a lowlife one, no." He pinches her cheek gently. "What you need to decide though, Sansa, is what you want, and what you want me to help you achieve."

"World Peace?" she says tartly, to cover up the flutter of excitement, of something perhaps a little like love, in her chest.

"Now that I can't give you, sadly," he drawls.

*

She needs to get back into the public eye, they decide – Petyr, Sansa, and his number two, Ros (who Sansa had inevitably felt threatened by at first before Ros talked knowingly about her own girlfriend and rolled her eyes at something Petyr said like he was an annoying younger brother). But it doesn't have to be the same old charity functions and tepid lunches, or memorial events. She's youthful, she can be more current, pick up an edge, expand her brand.

She gets an Instagram, and picks up half a million followers in her first day, having simply posted a picture of a city sunset, captioned 'Kings Landing showing off #sunset #lovethiscity'.

Robb texts her a few hours later saying that he can find someone to help with her social media posting if she wants. They want her to be muzzled, she thinks, but she doesn't want that. She fizzles at the possibilities of having a direct line to the world, at posting beautiful pictures to her own tastes (or, near enough, she's not going to post the pictures of lace lingerie and teetering velvet heels that Petyr sends her when he's out shopping, nor the pictures of him she takes surreptitiously), and supporting the causes she wants to support.

_We want to give you a separate voice, identity, to the Starks_, Ros had said, as she tapped at her phone with blood-red nails. _Get you out from their shadows._

As the weeks go on, her family start to get concerned, as if they can sense she's wriggling out of their grasp.

"Should you really be posting _selfies_?" her mother says on the phone, speaking of the picture Sansa had posted of her posing alongside a famous female singer she had run into in the bathroom at a ballet performance. "At a time like this? And going to so many parties?"

"I only went to two parties last week, not so many," Sansa replies. Petyr is across the room, ostensibly signing some papers but really watching her. He smirks at her words.

"We have to think of the campaign, Sansa. I know that's quite blunt to say, but it all matters," her mother says.

"It's Robb's campaign, not mine," she says, hiding her irritation.

"He's doing this for your father, for the family."

"I'm feeling more positive, I'm getting my mind off things," she says after a pause in which she hides her anger.

"I'm glad you're feeling better."

Sansa hangs up after a few more pleasantries and throws her phone onto the couch, sighing wearily. "She's impossible," she complains to Petyr.

He sets his papers down on the table beside him and she walks over, stands in front of him as he holds her by her waist. "I hear you're going to a gallery opening on Saturday and that you've got a – what did Ros call it – _killer_ dress to wear. I'm sad I'll miss that."

"If you will put meetings with economic interest groups above Art, Petyr, that's what you get."

She laughs at his proud smile.

He tugs her into his lap and kisses her neck.

"I'm happy," she whispers and she knows he hears her because his kisses pause, he sweeps a hand up her back. "You make me happy." She can feel a quivering vulnerability in her chest. To trust her happiness to someone else—

He pulls back and looks at her, touches his thumb to her chin. "I'm glad," he murmurs and then he kisses her hungrily and she feels her toes curl.

She's making high-pitched noises by the time he's torn her underwear off – underwear he had bought her – and set her down on his cock, digging his fingers into her backside to guide the roll of her hips.

"Oh god," she moans, "oh god."

He bucks his hips and mouths at her jaw and then he begins to speak, to tell her how tight she is, how wet, how hot. "Do you want me to come in you?" he asks, "do you want that?"

"Yes," she nods and he groans.

*

"You're looking well, Sansa," Cersei Baratheon says in greeting at the glitzy Governor's Ball in the old Sept of Baelor. She means it in a judgmental way, her smile knowing.

"Thank you, Cersei. You're looking well yourself," Sansa replies, giving her words their own extra bite.

Cersei smiles and twirls an artful piece of loose hair. "Champagne?" she offers, stopping a passing waiter with an imperious hand on his arm.

Two women standing nearby glance at Sansa.

"I'm alright, thank you," she replies and when Cersei smirks she says, "actually, I will have one," and takes a glass, takes a small sip. She feels wrongfooted, a child wearing an adult's clothes.

"There's something about champagne, isn't there," Cersei muses. "One could develop quite the _taste_ for it."

Sansa makes a non-committal noise, searching the crowd behind Cersei for someone to go and talk to.

"I've heard you're becoming quite the social butterfly."

Sansa shrugs and Cersei laughs.

"You looked just like you did when you were younger then." She mimes Sansa's shrug meanly. "All shrugs and moodiness."

"I'm still young if you go by the numbers," Sansa says, attempting to undercut her.

"You are young, yes," Cersei says and it sounds like an insult.

"I better go and mingle," Sansa says then, after a wincing pause.

"You do that," Cersei says with a smile.

When Sansa turns back from putting her mostly-full glass down on another waiter's tray, she sees Cersei talking to the two other women who are both watching her, looking beady-eyed with delight. She holds a tight smile as she passes them.

Despite Petyr's confidence, she still worries that they'll be found out now, too early, that Cersei knows. She imagines the headlines, the seedy undertones.

On the other side of the room, she bumps into someone turning a corner and quickly apologises before the other woman says her name delightedly and hugs her tightly.

"Margaery," Sansa says, feeling relief.

"I'm so happy to see you," Margaery exclaims, beaming when she steps back from the hug. "How have you been?"

"I'm good," Sansa says.

She and Margaery shared a flat at university, to her parent's disapproval, and they used to be partners in crime. _It's mutually assured destruction_, Margaery had told her once as they devoured a 3am pizza while teetering back from a crazy night, _you know things I've done, and I know things you've done. And we can't tell anyone or the other will tell too._

"I'm back," Margaery declares before Sansa has a chance to return the question, holding out her arms. "Back in KL, baby."

She smiles, she's forgotten her friend's exuberance. "I'm not sure it's ready for you."

"Probably," Margaery says with a theatrical flick of her hair. "We need to catch up, have you still got the same number?"

"No, a new one." She brings out her phone.

"A _very_ new one," Margaery declares. "Look at you with the latest technology."

"Is it? I didn't know."

"You'd have to have connections to get that this early."

"Well I am a Senator's daughter," she says.

Margaery hums and then dips forward. "And you do have other connections," she says softly.

"What?" Sansa replies, feeling a twinge of worry.

"Connections of a male kind," she says, pulling Sansa behind a row of potted plants.

"I don't know what you mean."

"It's OK, Sansa, _mutually-assured destruction_. Besides, he's been friends with my family for years."

"Friends," she repeats.

"It's not common knowledge, you and him, I only know because he told me himself this morning."

"This morning." Sansa's voice is flat now. What happened to all their careful planning? And why the hell is Petyr meeting secretly with _Margaery?_ Her jealousy makes her mouth taste sour.

"Oh, we met in passing at the bank. He said that you'd be here tonight and that you'd be in need of company. I joined the other dots myself."

"I don't want people to know, Margaery, it's private."

"I know," Margaery says, nodding. "Don't worry, he's got the worst stories of me, he could ruin me if he liked." She laughs brightly. "I promise my lips are sealed." She mimes a zip across her mouth. "I'm pleased for you though," she adds leaning close again.

Margaery smells of flowery perfume and hairspray, but not of champagne. She likes control more than anyone, she'll only drink when she wants to, and carefully plans any debauchery in advance. She won't let slip something she hasn't planned to, Sansa knows that, but she's still seething at what Petyr did.

"Why?" Sansa replies, thumbing her phone nervously, thinking about calling him and interrupting his dinner. He deserves to have his dinner interrupted, she thinks, see how he likes his plans being upended.

"Well, because you look good, you know, _well-fucked_."

"Margaery!" She pushes her further away from the plants.

"It's true though, you're glowing."

"Maybe it's sweat," she says mulishly.

"Nope, it's a good dicking down," Margaery retorts.

Sansa rolls her eyes. "I need to go," she says.

"Make him pay for it," Margaery says with a nod. "Make him grovel. And text me sometime."

"Sure," Sansa says and hurries away and out the door to the car waiting for her.

She asks the driver to take her to Petyr's house and when she arrives she sits herself in his hallway, on the antique seat next to the large mirror, and waits for him, stewing in her anger.

"Sansa, darling," he greets her, when he finally unlocks the door.

"Margaery?!" she exclaims. "You went behind my back, Petyr, what happened to our plans, to me being _in the fold?_"

He sets down his briefcase and approaches her softly. "It was part of the plan."

"Part of _your_ plan, I wasn't involved at all."

"You need allies, Sansa, friends even."

"I can make my own friends."

"I wanted to help."

"Like a parent planning a playdate," she retorts.

"Like someone who cares for you and wants you to be happy."

"I'm so pissed at you," she says, even though her body has relaxed in his presence now, softened.

"I don't tell you everything, Sansa, not everything about what I do. You don't want me to, not really," he says in the dark of the hall.

She can smell his rich cologne, the cigarette he had in the car.

"And, to be honest with you, it was a spur of the moment thing this morning when we crossed paths. I made a calculation and went for it."

"You better have something good on her, a juicy story."

"Oh, I have several, don't you worry."

"Take me to bed," she says abruptly, "I'm tired and I had a rotten time, Cersei was horrible to me. I just want to hide in bed now."

"Of course," he says. "Do you forgive me then?" he asks, kissing the corner of her mouth, brushing her hair back from her face.

"No, you'll need to make it up to me."

"Lucky that I came prepared," he says, pulling something glittering out of his pocket. "Will emeralds do?"

The next morning, after waking her up with a slow, grinding fuck that has her whimpering, Petyr brings her breakfast in bed.

"Cersei was horrible to you, you said," he notes as he drinks his tea and smooths the newspapers in his lap.

For as much as he loves technology, Sansa loves to tease him about his love of _old man things –_ newspapers, cups of tea, shoehorns, moneyclips.

_Sansa, I am an old man_, he always replies.

"She was a bitch, as usual."

"Well, we can do something about that, it fits in with our plans."

"Does it now," she says, hiding her smile in her pastry.

A man who brings her pastries in bed and promises to bring down a dynasty, a government, on her behalf, now that's a man you want, she thinks with a touch of hysterical giddiness.

*

A few weeks later, she's pulled through the back corridors of a restaurant, past the loud kitchen and the storeroom and then through a narrow door.

“Are you having fun with your date?” Petyr asks icily, shutting the cupboard door behind them and resting his hands to either side of her on the wall.

Her body twitches towards him, she feels herself getting warm even though he’s not touching her. She can smell his fancy aftershave and his eyes are glittering and hard, his attention fixed on her.

“Oh, yes, he’s quite charming,” she says.

“Sansa,” Petyr says, a warning note in his voice.

“And certainly more age appropriate, don’t you think?” she says blithely, her hand smoothing up his tie as the corner of his eye twitches.

“You think that boy can show you a good time?” he asks, moving closer.

It’s in rare moments like this, when his easy countenance falls away, his charm, that she can tell how dangerous he is, how ruthless, and she remembers her father's words about his black heart. She should hate herself for how hot it makes her.

“You think he knows what to do with a girl like you?” Petyr says, stroking his thumb down her cheek, pressing her into the wall and making her puff out a moan that has him smirking against her neck where he’s now pressing careful kisses that make her want to squirm.

“He might,” she says, her head tipping back, her hand clutching at the back of his suit jacket.

“You think he can get you this wet?” he says wickedly, his fingers dipping into her underwear.

“Maybe I’ll find out after dinner.”

“If he touches you,” Petyr croons, as he works her with his fingers, as he grasps her hair in his other fist, “I’ll ruin him. He’ll never work in this town again.”

“Petyr,” she says, and it's supposed to be an admonishment but it comes out as a moan.

“I could stop right now, leave you like this. It would only be fair punishment for you teasing me.”

“You were the one who agreed to this, to Ros’s suggestion,” she says between gasps, her hips rocking into his palm.

“I could leave you waiting, but I think I prefer it this way,” he says, biting gently at her jaw. “That you’ll return to the dinner table soaked and spent, that when all those cameras take photos of you and Harrold leaving the restaurant, they won’t know that perfect Sansa Stark has just gotten off in the cupboard, that her knickers are drenched,” he says as she whines and feels her toes curl in her shoes. “That she’s had my fingers knuckle deep inside of her. What would they think of you, if they knew what a naughty girl you were, Sansa?” he says and she comes with a full-body jerk, his mouth on hers swallowing her cries.

She only lasts ten minutes of the date after that, gulping down water, shifting in her seat as she thinks of Petyr waiting in his car around the block. Harrold is talking about a skiing holiday and Sansa nods once or twice and then says she has a headache.

She stops Harrold just before the door and tells him that she's not going home with him. _Not on a first date_, she adds, smiling winningly. She can see his disappointment. He doesn't know how to mask his face like she does. She'll tell Petyr and it will make him laugh, make _Petyr_ look pleased.

After a brief flurry of cameras outside, her driver, Petyr's driver, makes a loop before ducking into the garage where she changes cars and slides into the backseat next to Petyr.

"Did you have a nice dinner?" he asks, voice wicked, as the car drives off into the night, back to his house.

"Parts of it were nice."

He's smirking as he taps away at his phone. "Would you like a digestif?"

"Is that a sexual innuendo?" she asks.

He turns his phone towards her. "Here, the story's just broken and it's already gone big."

She bends closer to see the picture of Cersei, of Cersei and a man who isn't her husband, a man whose hair colour exactly matches hers.

"I'll drink to that," she says and a giddy laugh escapes her mouth. "Thank you, Petyr," she says, pressing a kiss to his cheek.

She moves sideways into his lap and he curves an arm around her, fingers her hair with his spare hand.

"I didn't just do it for you, you know," he murmurs. "I have my own plans."

"Oh, I know. World domination and all that," she says and he laughs, the deep laugh she likes best.

"Something like that," he says and kisses her.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! 
> 
> I don't know if I'll write any more of this, I find the political scheming part of it difficult to plot so it might just be a couple more vignettes if I do, but no promises.
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise fics](http://www.framboise-fic.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable photoset [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/612598005918531584/my-old-man-is-a-bad-man-by-framboise-7k-tags)


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